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- The Accelerator Conundrum
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chess.com
Solo Student Entrepreneur to Over $50M Revenue: Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Why do you need 300 people? The demand meant bigger server investment. Where does the people angle come in? Erik Allebest: We take our customer support very seriously. We believe that taking care of our community is a big deal. When you have five times as many active users, you need five times
Solo Student Entrepreneur to Over $50M Revenue: Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: What about the business model? Erik Allebest: We didn’t know. At first, we thought we’d be selling ads against it. We quickly realized that it wasn’t going to pay for itself. Also, we didn’t love ads as users. But we had this content that we had bought along with the domain name called
Solo Student Entrepreneur to Over $50M Revenue: Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: What happens next? Erik Allebest: I had an internship at a big tech company. I wasn’t that interested in it. Frankly, I did a bunch of internships while I was at Stanford. Pretty much every person I met with at every big company wanted to talk about entrepreneurship. None of them love their
Solo Student Entrepreneur to Over $50M Revenue: Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest (Part 2)
Erik Allebest: In 1998, my Chess Club President friend said, “Let’s build a website together.” He built a platform for me to sell Chess equipment online. It became known as Wholesale Chess. It became the largest chess retailer online. This was before Amazon. I sold the business of teaching and moved to e-commerce. I did
Solo Student Entrepreneur to Over $50M Revenue: Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest (Part 1)
Solo entrepreneurs get a bad rap, but they’re kicking ass out there! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Erik Allebest: I was born in Southern California. I was born to an entrepreneurial family. My dad
